The Infra Pod

The Infra Pod brings you insightful and thought-provoking discussions on the world of infrastructure software. This podcast is started by two engineers, Ian Livingstone (tech advisor for Snyk) and Tim Chen (General Partner at Essence VC), team up with a rotating cast of guests to dive deep into the latest trends and hot topics in the software infrastructure space.

Mar 09

Building a successful infra product between all the AI apps and model providers (chat with Louis from OpenRouter)

Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) interviewed Louis Vichy, co-founder of OpenRouter, about why he built OpenRouter to de-risk AI app development (end-user pays LLM costs), how it scaled to processing ~5–6T tokens/week, and what OpenRouter is today: a reli...

Feb 23

From 30 Seconds to 20ms: Solving Browser Speed for AI Agents (Chat with Catherine from Kernel)

In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (Keycard) sat down with Catherine Jue, co-founder and CEO of Kernel, to explore the cutting-edge world of browser infrastructure for AI agents. Catherine shares her journ...

Feb 09

Coding agents need infra to apply code changes! (Chat with Tejas from Morph)

Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) sat down with Tejas Bhakta (CEO of Morph) to chat about building infrastructure for the fastest file edit APIs for coding agents. He shares how Morph delivers 10,000 tokens/second through speculative decoding, why cursor ...

Jan 26

Let's chat about vibe coding & Ralph! (Chat with Dexter at Humanlayer)

In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim and Ian sit down with Dexter Horthy, CEO of Human Layer, to explore the evolution of AI coding agents and the future of software development. Dexter shares his journey from building data tools to discovering the ...

Jan 12

Building a bug-free vibe coding world (Chat with Akshay from Antithesis)

In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Ian Livingston (Keycard) and Tim Chen (Essence VC) interviewed the Field CTO Akshay Shah of Antithesis, diving deep into the world of distributed systems, reliability, and the future of software testing. The conversa...

2025/12/29

Infra Pod 2025: Our Favorite Moments, Hottest Takes, and What’s Next

Join Tim from Essence VC and Ian Livingston from Keycard for the year-end 2025 recap of Infra Pod! In this special episode, Tim and Ian reflect on their favorite moments, hottest takes, and biggest lessons from a year of rapid change in infrastructure, AI,...

2025/12/15

From Spark to Eventual: Reinventing Data for the AI Era (Chat with Sammy from Eventual)

In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim from Essence VC and co-host Ian Livingston (Keycard) interviewed Sammy Sdu, CEO of Eventual, a multimodal data processing platform. Sammy shares his journey from AI research and self-driving cars to founding Even...

2025/12/01

Render is defining what taste means in backend infra (Chat with Anurag from Render)

In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim and Ian are joined by Anurag, CEO of Render, to discuss the journey of building a modern cloud platform from scratch. The conversation covers Anurag’s background at Stripe, the challenges of cloud infrastructure,...

2025/11/17

Bazel and the Next Wave of AI Developer Infrastructure (Chat with Alex Eagle from Aspect Build)

Welcome to Episode 53 of The Infra Pod! Hosts Tim from Essence and Ian from Keycard are joined by special guest Alex Eagle, CEO and co-founder of Aspect Build. In this episode, Alex shares his journey from working on Angular at Google to founding a company...

2025/10/06

The AI Analyst is coming to change Data Teams (Chat with Lucas from Gravity)

In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (CEO of Keycard) sat down with Lucas Thelosen, founder of Gravity and former head of product for data and AI at Google. Lucas shares his journey from leading teams at Google and Looker to lau...

2025/09/22

The next cloud to overtake AWS are AI sandboxes?! (Chat with Ivan from Daytona)

Join host Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingston (Keycard.sh) as they sat down with Ivan Burazin, CEO and co-founder of Daytona to explore the cutting edge of agent-native infrastructure. From the origins of Daytona to the challenges and opportunities of...

2025/09/08

Future of File Storage for AI (Chat with Hunter, CEO of Archill)

Ian (Keycard) and Tim Essence VC) engage in an insightful discussion with Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil. The episode delves into the motivations behind Archil, a new data startup focused on revolutionizing data storage for cloud applications. Hunter explain...

2025/08/25

Turning Gaming PCs to Serverless CI for AI! (Chat with Aditya from Blacksmith)

Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) sat down with Aditya, CEO of Blacksmith, to explore the inception and innovative approach of Blacksmith in the CI/CD space. Blacksmith utilizes gaming CPUs and NVMe SSDs to deliver high-performance, serverless CI compute....

2025/08/11

Building the Future of AI with Long-term Memory (Chat with Charles from Letta)

In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard.sh) delve into the fascinating world of AI memory with Charles, the CEO and co-founder of Letta. They explore the intricacies of memory in AI, its current state, how it’s implemented in va...

2025/07/28

The bet on Postgres to be the backbone to run reliable services (Chat with Jeremy and Qian from DBOS)

In this episode of the Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) hosted DBOS building a reliable backend service, with guests including CEO Jeremy and cofounder Qian. The discussion delves into the company's motivation, their research work making softw...

2025/07/14

Next-Gen Data Processing with Incremental Query Engines (Chat with Gilad from Epsio)

Join Tim from Essence VC and Ian from Keycard as they sit down with Gilad Kleinman (CEO of Epsio), to explore the next generation incremental query engine they're building. Gilad shares his journey from a software developer focusing on low-level Linux kern...

2025/06/30

Going from integrating SaaS to merging them through AI! Chat with Gil from Merge.dev

In this episode of the Infra Pod, hosts Tim from Essence VC and Ian from Keycard, are joined by Gil, CTO and co-founder of Merge.dev. They discuss the inception and mission of Merge, its growth, and how the company is solving complex integration problems f...

2025/06/16

How is AI changing the security in modern fintech? Chat with Branden (Head of Infosec) from Mercury

In this episode of The Infra Pod, Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) are joined by Branden Wagner, Head of Information Security at Mercury. They delve into the nuances of Information Security, discuss the interplay between human and technical controls, and...

2025/06/03

Helping enterprises to adopt AI the real way - Chat with Hamel Hussain

Ian and Tim host a conversation with Hamel Husain, an AI influencer and consultant who has worked with major tech companies like GitHub and Airbnb. They delve into Husain's journey to becoming an independent consultant, his insights on the common struggles...

2025/05/19

Owning both software and hardware to run the best cloud for deployment - Chat with Jake from Railway

In this episode of the Infra Pod, Tim and Ian sit down with Jake, CEO of Railway, to explore how Railway is reinventing cloud deployment. Jake shares the origin story of Railway, their unique approach to simplifying cloud deployments, and the innovatio...